When I came back from Australia, I was off work for a little while. Such is the life of a freelancer - sometimes you can pick up work really easily, sometimes it's a struggle. Thankfully for me it has always been pretty easy. But for some reason this time was quite a long spell of no work, about 2-3 weeks. I don't deal well with having no work on - I get bored and restless, wanting to go out but not wanting to spend too much money and I get so sick of not being productive. So after a week or so of this, I decided to go and hire a car and drive around the Cotswolds because I was thoroughly sick of sitting around feeling anxious!
I usually hire cars from near the airports - hiring a car in London itself is always painfully expensive, and I don't actually want to drive through London. So it's easier to just hop on a bus or tube or train and go to an airport to pick the car up. I wish hiring a car was as easy as getting there though. When I was here first, it was quite easy. But the car hire places seem to have changed their rules and now want to put a block on your credit card of at least £1250 (about $AUD 2200). They also don't seem to do unlimited miles here anymore, and you only get about 80-100 miles (130-160 km's) per day. That's not really much, even going to my parents' house in Devon is more than that... And having a British licence, they put you through the ringer! I swear, it's so much easier to hire a car on my Aussie licence, though technically I'm not supposed to do that. But I don't understand why they make it so hard for Brits, surely an Aussie would require more insurance, and could realistically crash a car then bugger off home and it would be very hard to track them.
Anyway, that's my car-hire rant over! I picked it up and started driving. My first stop was Chastleton House in Enstone. It sadly wasn't open when I was there, but I had a bit of a stickybeak around. It was a really nice place!
The next stop was the lovely Chipping Campden. This is a beautiful part of the Cotswolds, with a very old high street (between 14th and 17th C) and old market place. In fact, "Chipping" means market, so it has been known as a market town for as long as it's had its name! It was quite a rich market town in its day and traded in high quality wool mostly. Today, a lot of the old buildings have been turned into hotels, but they are very much in keeping with the quiet beauty of the town.
I wandered down the high street, then bought a coronation chicken sandwich from a deli and sat on a bench nearby to eat it. Not sure why I chose coronation chicken, as I find the combination of curry and mayo very confusing. But hey, it was rather nice, in a weird British way.
I'll leave the rest of the photos for another post. Needless to say, the Cotswolds is one of the loveliest places to drive around! So glad I decided to go back to this area to have another look around!